


Repeat Customer

by Setcheti



Series: The Last Chance Diner [3]
Category: Supernatural, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Mild Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-09
Updated: 2014-03-09
Packaged: 2018-01-15 03:17:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1289125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Setcheti/pseuds/Setcheti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean hadn't really expected the guy to come back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The tiny little AU was a medium-sized AU now, and the author looked at the way it was growing and said, “This is getting kind of weird, are you sure you want to grow this way?” To which the AU responded, “Who’s telling this story, you or me?”

Very few Loners ever came into the diner more than once, so Dean hadn’t really expected the depressed soldier-artist to show back up; but then one night, surprisingly, the guy had. On the same old Eagle and wearing the same battered bomber jacket, but this time he looked a little more lively. He responded to Dean’s greeting with a shy sort of smile, and then he picked a seat at the counter and shucked off his jacket.

He had tattoos running up and down both arms. Dean’s mouth dropped open. “Man, you did _not_ do all of that with a Sharpie.”

The guy sat down, grinning. “Some of it I did – they make those pens in fine point too, you know. But the others are from a transfer, it worked better than I ever would have thought. So thanks.”

He ordered the same thing he’d ordered the last time, a burger and fries and pie and a vanilla milkshake and coffee, but this time he made small talk with Dean while he cooked – awkwardly at first, like he wasn’t used to doing it, but Dean was willing to meet him halfway on that. He could tell the guy was sincere and not hitting on him or anything creepy like that, he was just…grateful. And maybe lonely, too.

Dean himself actually wasn’t lonely – he’d never really had people he knew around him consistently outside of his immediate family and one or two others – but he didn’t resent this guy having that problem. There were probably people around him, they just weren’t people he was connecting with right at the moment. So he talked about nothing with the guy while he cooked and at a slower pace while the guy ate, and then they both had pie and it was all good. The guy only hung around for a little while after that, said he had to be somewhere and people would get worried if he was too late, but he said he’d probably be back through eventually because Highway 49 was ‘nice and calm’. Dean just grinned and shook his head when he waved goodbye. The guy was a Loner and didn’t even know it.


	2. Chapter 2

Over the course of the next few months, however, Dean started to revise that opinion. Steve, the guy on the old Eagle, had actually started showing up almost regularly enough to be a regular. He was always en route to or from something which he didn’t seem to want to discuss, and sometimes on the ‘from’ route he looked quite a bit the worse for wear. Oddly, he ate more on those days than he did on ‘to’ days, but Dean privately figured that was because wherever Steve had been he hadn’t gotten to eat very much while he was there and he was making up for it. Or maybe someone where he lived – Malibu, apparently, although he didn’t seem to like it much – was giving him shit about what he ate or how much. Dean started insisting that Steve eat the Daily Special with him on those days, that way he could refill the plate as many times as necessary. Once ‘necessary’ had added up to four refills of meatloaf and potatoes and vegetables followed by two pieces of pie and two milkshakes, which Dean wouldn’t have believed if he hadn’t been there to see it. And he’d actually been concerned enough by it to ask if he needed to yell at someone for not feeding Steve while he was working, which had made the younger guy blush. “No, it’s not…it’s not their fault. They just all eat a lot less than I do, and if we’ve been really…busy, and people are upset, none of them want to eat at all. I don’t want to eat in front of them, or to still be eating when they’re done and make them wait for me, so it’s just…it’s easier to stop on the way back and get what I need here.”

“Hey, I got no problem with that,” Dean had immediately disclaimed. “You can stop in any time you want, you know that – whether you’ve got money or not, I mean it. You need to eat, you stop. You’re good company, we can work it out in trade or somethin’. Maybe you can draw me a tattoo.”

The resultant smile hit him like a ton of bricks; Dean wondered briefly if it was the first time anyone had ever just been nice to the poor guy, told him they liked having him around. And then he wondered just how much all the alone-time was really getting to him, if a smile from one of his regulars was going to affect him like that. Luckily Steve didn’t notice; he was digging in his knapsack, a worn-out khaki thing that looked like it had seen better days. He pulled out a sketchpad and flipped it open, pawing through it to find a blank page. Dean stopped him at one sketch to get a better look. It was a woman wearing a flight suit, holding a gun, looking badass the way only a comic book character could. He whistled. “Wow, Steve. Is this for a graphic novel or something?”

Steve shook his head. “She’s a…co-worker, actually.” Dean raised an eyebrow full of innuendo and the younger guy blushed again. “No, not like that, just a co-worker. She’s dating…my former best friend.”

“Ouch.” Dean made a face, flipping the page back over. “Sorry, man, that sucks.”

“Some days, yeah. I keep telling myself I’m okay with it, though, so one day I figure I’ll be telling myself the truth.” He shrugged and found a blank page. “I would love to do a tattoo for you, Dean. Describe what you’d want for me and I’ll work on it.”

Dean hadn’t really meant right then, and he hadn’t really been thinking about getting a tattoo in the first place, but he felt bad for asking about the sketch so he thought for a minute and then started describing. He even grabbed a pen and drew a few symbols, and then he showed Steve how they all fit together just so to make a protection sigil – he didn’t say it was real, just that the symbols were old and meant protection from evil. He also didn’t say that the last time he’d drawn one it had been with his own blood, although that was true too. Steve sketched out a few shapes of his own, re-drew the sigil himself with input from Dean about correct line placement, and then put the sketchbook away again and said he’d put some thought into it and show him later. And then he ate the rest of his pie and finished his milkshake and he and Dean just shot the shit for a little while longer before Steve had to finish heading back home to Rich People Beach House Hell, as Steve called it. Apparently the rich neighbors thought he was pretty and should be grateful for their attention and Steve thought they were spoiled assholes who needed to have sense beaten into them. Dean laughed about that after he left. Steve was really pretty and really built; he kind of felt sorry for the rich neighbors for having to look – Malibu was beach country, he was sure they were constantly getting an eyeful – but not being able to touch.

 


	3. Chapter 3

Three weeks later, Steve was back – this time going to and not in much of a hurry about it. “The rest of them fly, usually,” he told Dean. “I don’t really like to fly all that much, I’ve had some…bad experiences in airplanes, so whenever I get the chance I leave early and just meet them wherever. And this time is just a meeting, anyway.” He pulled out his sketchpad and some other things while Dean was making his order, and when Dean turned around he found himself looking at a sketch, not just of the tattoo they’d talked about, but also of how it would look on his arm. “Oh wow, Steve…I don’t know what to say, man. That is awesome.”

Steve grinned. “Actually, there’s more. If you ever wanted more, that is. I did some research,” he flipped the page, “and came up with this.”

‘This’ was a three-quarter sleeve that was designed to wrap over his shoulder like a piece of armor – and would come down around but not touch the scar on the inner aspect of his forearm. Other sigils had been incorporated, but subtly, so that they just looked like part of a design. Dean was blown away. “That…God, Steve, now I really don’t know what to say. Except whatever you’re doing now,” he suspected it was being some kind of merc or doing private security, actually, “you could make way more money doing tattoos.”

“Actually, I’ve been thinking about that,” Steve admitted, just blushing a little bit. “My job is kind of…well, I don’t get much warning before I have to go to work, let’s put it that way. But I’ve been thinking that being a tattoo artist would be something I could work into that schedule. And I asked a friend of mine who’s a scientist – I mean, this guy is a genius, really – if it was possible to make an ink that wouldn’t come off unless you wanted it to, to use for inking on tattoos. He’s looking into it, he thought it was a good idea.”

“Yeah, it is,” Dean agreed, nodding. “There are a lot of people who’d probably like to get a tat they could take off again if they wanted to but not until they wanted to. And yeah, I think people would be willing to wait for a really good artist like you to be available, they wouldn’t expect you to keep regular hours or anything because you’re an artist.” He went back to the grill, checking the burger he was making – ‘going to’ didn’t require extra food, it was just a pit stop. “So you’ve got a friend who’s a scientist, huh? His name isn’t Carlos, is it?”

“No, why?”

“There’s some little hole-in-the-wall town I get a radio signal from sometimes, their radio announcer has got it _bad_ for a scientist named Carlos, gushes about the guy on the air all the time.”

“Jesus, poor Carlos.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought too. Unless Carlos has got it bad back, of course; maybe it’s some kind of game they play with each other, I don’t know.” Dean finished off the burger, dumped  a pile of fries onto the plate with it, and then brought it over, moving the sketchbook out of the way. He studied the sleeve picture while Steve ate, making little marks of his own on the side of the page again. He’d just been trying to make Steve feel better when he’d brought it up the first time…but now that he saw it, he was starting to want this tattoo. It was beautiful and it had been created just for him, just because he’d said he wanted it. That wasn’t a common occurrence in Dean’s life.

Steve kept up their usual back-and-forth with Dean while he ate, and then once he was finished he ambled into the bathroom and washed up, then came back out and pulled out a canvas roll that, unrolled, proved to be full of Sharpies in all sizes and colors. “I can put the first one we talked about on tonight, so you can see what you think,” he told Dean, flipping back to the central design with the protective sigil and tapping it with his finger. “I’d rather wait on the sleeve, if you want it, until we can use ink that won’t fade. So what do you say?”

Dean could have said no, he knew he could have. He knew he could have said he was working and that was something he really shouldn’t do in the diner when it was open. He could have said that…but he didn’t want to. Not only because he knew it would make Steve happy if he let him do it, or because he knew there really wasn’t very much chance of someone else coming into the diner, but because it was a coincidence and those were something he’d learned never, ever to ignore. So he shucked off his overshirt and rolled up the sleeve of the t-shirt underneath it, baring his right bicep. “I have a big…scar on the other side,” he explained. “So it’ll have to be this arm.” He got himself a drink and sat down on the stool that was behind the counter, making sure he was close enough to answer the phone with his left hand if it happened to ring, and propped his right elbow up on the counter. “I’ll try my best not to twitch.”

“I’ll try my best not to tickle,” Steve told him, smiling. And then he selected a fine-point black pen and got started. Dean watched him work, smiling a little when the sigil itself was completed and he felt the little tingle that meant the lines had come together properly and the protection had been activated. Once all of the black lines were drawn they waited a little to make sure they were all dry, and then Steve added the colors. Dean felt another little tingle when the last of the color was added to the outer edge of the design, although he wasn’t sure why and he really didn’t worry about it too much. It hadn’t felt like a bad thing, and he would definitely have known if it did.

The tattoo, when finished, was astounding. Steve took a picture of it with his phone, then packed his pens and sketchpad away in his knapsack and finished his coffee, talking aimlessly with Dean about nothing much at all again until it was time for him to get back on the road. Dean watched the old Eagle – which he now knew had a modified gas tank – pull out onto the highway, taillight dwindling to a firefly-sized speck in what seemed like seconds, and wondered again when lonely had snuck up on him.


	4. Chapter 4

Steve showed up again two weeks later, coming from this time, and this time he also had a friend with him – a shorter, somewhat older guy wearing well broken-in riding leathers who was really obviously a Loner. They both seemed tired but in good spirits, and they both ordered the Daily Special, which today was chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes and three kinds of farmers-market squash sliced thin and sautéed on the grill. The new guy, who Steve had introduced as Clint, started to grin when Dean was right there to refill Steve’s plate when it started to get low. “So I actually get to see you eat for real? This should be a learning experience.”

“As long as you don’t try to educate any of the others, learn all you want,” Steve rebutted, digging back in. “Dean, what’s the pie today?”

“Peach-berry slab – one of the trucks was through, he had half a bushel of random crap that he just gave to me so he wouldn’t have to toss it later. It was too soft to freeze, and there wasn’t enough to go the traditional route, so slab was my best option.”

“Hey, pie is pie,” Steve disclaimed. “I don’t care what shape it is, you know that.” He finished off his second plate, and a third, and then asked for another vanilla milkshake and got a large piece of pie to go with it. He frowned at Clint’s look of concern. “Stop.”

Clint just frowned back at him, shook his head and went back to eating. “This is really good,” he told Dean, poking at the last of his squash and fending off the offer of more. “No, unlike Steve here I do not have two hollow legs and a black hole for a stomach – and I want some of that pie, too. Slab?”

“Long and flat instead of fat and round,” Dean told him, cutting a generous square of the pie for him.  “Same crust, though. Ice cream?”

“I wish,” Clint told him, pushing away his empty plate and starting on the pie. “Oh man, this is _really_ good. I could eat this all day.” He nudged Steve. “Can you make this?”

Dean raised his eyebrows, and Steve blushed. “I end up cooking…well, a lot. Because I eat a lot and nobody else does.” A sigh. “Yes, Clint, I can make slab pie. And if you’re nice to me I’ll even let you have a piece of it.”

Clint choked on a laugh, and Dean had to grin. He hadn’t been sure, when they’d first come in, but he could see now that the other man was teasing Steve because he wanted Steve to relax and tease him back. This was an actual friend, not just a work-friend. For some reason that made Dean feel good, kind of strangely satisfied with himself, although he wasn’t sure why and he wasn’t sure if feeling that way was a good thing or not.

That was when Clint suddenly blinked at him, what could only be recognition flooding his face. “I’ll be damned,” he said, putting down his fork. “I thought you looked familiar.” Steve was giving the older man a look – crap, a _warning_ look, and wasn’t that a surprise – but Clint waved it off. “No, not like that. This guy,” he gestured to the now-wary Dean, “saved my ass in the field once. This…well, I don’t know what the hell it was, it was a thing and it was furry and it looked rabid, but it showed up when I was kind of stuck where I was and it was snuffling around and then it scented me and started to snarl and stalk me and I just about wet my pants – I was out of ammo, just had a knife and this thing had the reach on me by about a foot and a half. And then a shotgun went off and it turned around, tried to jump, and fell over and died right there. Dean here came out of the brush and checked it, and then he set it on fire and called over to me that I really needed to pick a better rendezvous spot…and then he just turned around and walked back into the brush and disappeared. I told Phil…” For some reason that made his voice break, just a little, and Steve put a hand on his shoulder. “Yeah, thanks buddy. I told him, and he said to leave it alone, that there were guys out there taking care of the crap SHIELD should be but wasn’t and the best way to say thanks was just to forget I ever saw anything. He mentioned once that he’d returned the favor, something about Feds being stupid, but still…” He held out his hand to Dean across the counter. “Man, I’m not trying to put you on the spot or anything…but I owe you one.”

Dean managed a lukewarm grin and accepted the offered hand with a shrug. “I appreciate the sentiment…but you know, or at least I’m pretty sure you know, that it’s all part of the job. You just do your thing and then fade, nothing good ever comes of sticking around.”

“Yeah, I know.” The handshake was firm and friendly, though. “That’s why the job sucks so much.” He saw the look and grinned, picking his fork back up. “Go ahead, ask.”

Dean grinned back, warmer this time, and shook his head. “I know what you do, or at least what you used to do, and I do remember your suit smacking down some feds who were hassling me,” he said, and nodded when he saw the flinch. “Yeah, sorry man – believe me, I know how it feels to lose one. But there is no way in hell Steve here was ever a spook unless you guys shanghaied him into it.”

“Oh, they tried,” Clint responded, rolling his eyes. “Didn’t work, thank god. He’s our team leader.” He returned the shoulder clasp the now-tense Steve had just given him. “A little too good at it sometimes, though – the rest of ‘em forget he’s not supposed to be doing it all the time. We’re workin’ on that. Helps a lot now that we’re on the West Coast.”

“Rich People Beach House Hell,” Steve said, losing some of the tension and going back to his pie. “I told Dean about it, he agreed with me.”

“Yeah, I agree with you too,” Clint told him, also resuming eating. “You’re not the only one whose ass is getting oogled all the time by that Botox-harpy next door, you know. ‘Cept I don’t think she’d try to offer you money for it.”

Steve actually dropped his fork. “She didn’t.”

“Yup – and offered more if I could convince you to join us.” Clint chuckled. “I told Tony, so I think she probably won’t be our neighbor very much longer. He had that gleam in his eye, you know the one.”

“Yeah, and whenever I see it I’m scared,” Steve retorted drily, requesting seconds on pie with a nod. “In case you’ve forgotten, Tony thinks limits are just the sign of a creative challenge.”

Clint froze. “You don’t think…”

“That he’s going to run her out of Malibu, if not out of the state entirely?” Steve snorted. “I thought he’d been awfully happy about something lately, that’s probably it.”

Clint considered that, then shrugged. “Well, we’ll know soon enough – he won’t keep that to himself for very long.”

“Tony’s our tech guy, and he’s a sweetheart when he wants to be, but he can get…overly enthusiastic about some things,” Steve explained to the wide-eyed Dean. “Revenge is one of them.”

Dean smiled. “I think we all have our moments, when it comes to that.”

“True,” Steve replied. And smiled back.

Dean had no trouble reading the look on Clint’s face right then, even though he was seeing it out of the corner of his eye and it was gone almost immediately: It was relief. And Dean got it. He’d suspected, back when he’d first met Steve, that the guy had people around him he wasn’t connecting with, or maybe who just weren’t connecting with him, or maybe a little bit of both. Clint the Former Spook had not only just confirmed that Dean had been right…but that the situation had been worrying him, and that he’d been afraid Steve wasn’t connecting with _anyone_.

Steve was connecting with Dean just fine, though. Even being basically outed as a former hunter didn’t stop Dean from feeling good about that. And Steve seemed to have let the comment about the furry rabid thing pass right by him, which made Dean feel even better. He really hadn’t wanted to explain that, it was part of his old life. His new life didn’t have monsters in it.

Their usual round of meaningless small talk was a little different with Clint there, but it was still nice even if Clint was a lot more sharply sarcastic than Steve was ever going to get, and Dean was honestly sorry to see the two men leave. He tamped that feeling down quickly, though, because it was one he really couldn’t afford to have if he was going to keep his nice, contented life…well, nice and contented. So he waved to Steve and allowed himself a see-you-later because Steve always got happy when he said that, and about two minutes after they walked out the door he noticed Clint’s gloves laying behind the napkin dispenser on the counter and thirty seconds after that Clint came walking back into the diner alone to retrieve them. He chuckled and shook his head at Dean’s raised eyebrow. “Yeah, I know it’s a cheap trick – and so does Steve, because he called me on it. Still, though…” He shrugged. “I told him I wanted to apologize for outing you like I did, which I do and I’m sorry I brought up bad shit for you because this,” he waved a hand to indicate the diner, “is not a bad shit kind of place. But what I really wanted to say…Dean, man, we couldn’t come up with a god-damned thing to help the kid move on, and then he came in here and you told him to get a Sharpie and that was all it took. He’s started talking about doin’ tattoos for other people now, and making plans, where before we’d ask him what he wanted to do and he’d just change the subject. He’s actually living again, not just goin’ through the motions. So that’s two I owe you, and I won’t forget it.”

And then he was out the door, leaving an openmouthed, speechless Dean behind. Dean did retain enough presence of mind to wave to Steve when they drove away, though, because he had a feeling that if he didn’t Steve would probably come back to find out what was wrong because he’d assume Clint had _said_ something wrong.

That weird, not-sure feeling he’d had earlier…Dean knew what it was now, and he knew it probably wasn’t a bad thing. It was the feeling of having a friend.


	5. Chapter 5

Steve continued to show up at the Last Chance at irregular intervals, usually alone although once or twice Clint was with him, and then one night he showed up in what looked like going-to mode with someone new in tow. The newcomer was a small, harmless-looking guy, probably closer to forty than thirty, and Steve introduced him as Bruce. Bruce turned out to be Steve’s friend the scientist, and he had an ink sample with him he wanted Dean to test. “I want to see how well it wears under different conditions,” he explained. “You’d be exposing it to things Steve and Clint wouldn’t, and we don’t test things on Tony because he’s a hypochondriac and he whines. I can put the dot on your wrist, that way nobody will notice it.”

Dean let him apply the dot of ink, which was actually a little sunburst in a circle put on with a small stamp Bruce had with him. “Not an artist?” he guessed.

Bruce smiled and shook his head. “Nope, not even close. But I do know where a craft store is, and I know better than to take Clint when I go.”

“You’d have been wearing a picture of Hello Kitty, or one of those little colored ponies,” Steve explained. “Clint has a thing for the clumsy one, I think he said its name is Derp.”

“That’s kind of a mean name.”

“Yeah, I thought so too. Clint swears it’s meant affectionately.”

“It is,” Bruce confirmed. “And the pony’s name is Derpy Hooves, not Derp.” He tucked the stamp and ink away again, and then he ordered two pieces of pie to go. “Steve’s staying,” he clarified at Dean’s surprised look. “I’m going to go pay visit to an old friend for a while, I didn’t realize he was out here until Steve mentioned you hearing him on the radio. Gushing over a scientist named Carlos, right?” Dean nodded. “Yeah. Carlos was his husband.”

“Was?”

“Was. He died years ago in a lab accident that probably wasn’t, but it was under some black-book agency’s thumb so the whole thing got covered up. Your radio signal from that weird small town? There is no town, just Cecil. He’s caretaking a power station out here in the middle of nowhere, and broadcasting his fake news show at night with his personal transmitter setup probably just to have something to do. I was having some…problems when he lost Carlos, so I wasn’t around for him; I figure the least I can do now is check on the poor guy and make sure he hasn’t gone completely around the bend out there by himself.” He raised a hand when Dean started to open his mouth. “I’ve heard the ‘show’, I know what it sounds like – but he just has a weird sense of humor, really. He’s always been like that.” A sad, almost wistful little smile. “Carlos liked that about him.”

He took the carton of pie – banana cream today, because Dean had needed to use up some eggs and meringue was good for that – and went back out, and Dean raised an eyebrow at Steve, who shrugged. “Bruce can take care of himself, I’m not too worried,” he said. “Honestly, I was just glad to hear him say he had a friend, he’s a little too...well, he spends a lot of time alone in the lab by choice, let’s put it that way. Hopefully this Cecil guy will be glad to see him.”

“Hopefully he won’t be as nuts as he sounds on the radio,” Dean said, which made Steve snicker. “So, what’ll it be tonight?”

Steve shrugged. “The usual, unless the special needs to move – I know what meringue means, because I know you don’t really like it.”

“The special it is,” Dean confirmed.  “And we’ll pull the meringue layer off, since I know you don’t like it all that much either.” He turned around to get two of the non-ironically robin’s egg blue ‘special’ plates down – one for him, one for Steve – grinning when he heard the rustling sound that meant Steve was getting out his sketchpad. He was getting more and more okay with this having a friend thing.


End file.
